Tag Archives | Mushrooms

Yep, one the cooler things I've ever seen, and hey, I just interviewed Emily Pothast and Steven Miller who are the freakish brainchildren behind the whole thing:
Thad: I found the concept particularly fascinating, because one of the themes that has been interpenetrating my psychic life as of late has been that of female energy consuming and feeding off the masculine — as if the previous era of humanity has shifted and now it’s time for the sacred feminine to devour the dark war mongering energy that “mankind” has created. Terence Mckenna, Whitley Strieber, and others have described encountering entities that have an almost insectile-multi-eyed-telepathic-hive-mind characteristics. I don’t know if you’re up on insect sexuality, but the feminine typically reigns supreme in that micro-verse. There are no King Bees, if you catch my drift. Thoughts?
EP: Oh wow. Well, I mentioned the inspiration of mystery religions, myths that explore the inner workings of sex and death, which definitely relate to the core processes of nature. These myths are at the root of Christianity, but while the basic mechanism of the dying/resurrecting godman is alive and well in the character of Christ, the “feminine” and erotic aspects of the eternal that were also present in early versions of the myth have been considered taboo for most of Western history.

I’ve been a fan of Krystle Cole for a while now. She’s well known for her numerous informational videos about psychedelics. Her website, Neurosoup.com, provides information for a broad spectrum of entheogens, entactogens, and other little helpers to the human pursuit for greater understanding in the bigger picture of life. We spoke about her perspective on psychedelics and life in general.

Roberts: You’re a person who has experienced a broad spectrum of psychedelics. You’re probably one of the most encyclopedic reference points for the breadth of the psychedelic experience. How has your perspective on psychedelics changed since the first time you did it?

Cole: When I started using entheogens, the first I used was MDMA — which is more of an entactogen than an entheogen — but that’s the first time I delved into the psychedelic experience. My level of understanding has really grown since then. It’s not just from the amount of other substances I’ve done that are stronger than MDMA, but also from life in general, and everything I do that doesn’t relate to psychedelics.

As I was catching up on the always brilliant Phantasmaphile blog the other day (ran by the rather bewitching Pam Grossman), I noticed that she’d declared 2013 as the “year of the witch”. Hmmm, never occurred to me but let’s run with it. December 21, 2012 supposedly represented a shift in consciousness and I’ll be honest, I sort of feel like a psychic veil has in fact been subtly lifted. Has a new Aeon begun which will re-align us with the sacred shamanic feminine knowledge they used to build the pyramids? I think you’d have to look back on our era from at least fifty years in the future to make any sort of determination on that one. Let’s just remember that it’s fun to pretend that it did, and us doing so enriches the cosmic current of the macro-consciousness. The future already happened man.

So with this in mind, I’m gonna hopefully do a series of posts in 2013 about women artists, musicians, philosophers, etc.… Read the rest

A California mixed-martial artist has pleaded guilty to ripping out his friend’s heart and tongue while the two were on hallucinogenic drugs:

When police arrived that day at a home at the mouth of the Klamath River, they found Wyatt naked and covered in blood. He told the officers, “I killed him,” and said he had cut out Powell’s heart and tongue, according to court documents.

The officers found Powell’s body on the couch of the Requa home. His chest was cut open, and his heart, tongue and the skin of his face were gone, court records said. His heart was found charred in a wood-burning stove.

It gets worse, if you can believe it:

An autopsy determined the organs had been removed while Powell was still alive, the documents said.

Is this the answer to the ever-growing plastic scourge on our planet? From co.exist:

The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills.

The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.

The common plastic is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. Once it gets into the trash stream, it persists for generations.

Someday the lifeless bodies of all of us may be laid into the cold earth zipped snugly in the outfit at right. Artist Jae Rhim Lee designed her mushroom burial suit to address how we part with the dead — “By trying to preserve the body we poison the living.” The garment is embedded with spores of toxin-cleaning, flesh-eating mushrooms that will consume the corpse wearing it, leaving the earth cleansed and renewed as we make our exit:

The first prototype of the Infinity Burial Suit is a body suit embroidered with thread infused with mushroom spores. The embroidery pattern resembles the dendritic growth of mushroom mycelium. The Suit is accompanied by an Alternative Embalming Fluid, a liquid spore slurry, and Decompiculture Makeup, a two-part makeup consisting of a mixture of dry mineral makeup and dried mushroom spores and a separate liquid culture medium. Combining the two parts and applying them to the body activates the mushroom spores to develop and grow.﻿

One of the highlights of Graham Hancock’s lecture in support of his new book Entangled is when he shows us how the mythological character that he refers to as “Father Christmas” (better known in the U.S. as Santa Claus) has much in common with Siberian Tungus shamans who fly high on fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms, eaten by reindeer whose urine is then drunk by the shamans — and whose urine is then drunk by villagers, passing through up to seven bladders before potency is lost. Gross, right? Yes, but effective!

disinformation reader Dainius sent along a link to a similar account, saying it’s “about how the meme of Santa Claus was born in the minds of tribal psychonauts, and shows the fascinating links between Christmas and shamanism,” by Mark Adams at the Aminam Recro blog:

These red and white mushrooms, Amanita muscaria, were found in an alpine forest around Creede, Colorado.

Anyone who buys goods online can identify with this post from Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

Lately at my house we’ve been getting a lot of packages. And with packages, comes styrofoam. My three-year-old loves styrofoam. Me, not so much. He breaks it up and it makes a huge mess. The little bits get everywhere and they are impossible to clean up. I can only imagine that multiplied by 100 million homes in the U.S. alone.
Styrofoam is everywhere, but nobody really thinks about it. It is a $20 billion dollar business in the U.S. and occupies an estimated 25% of the country’s landfill by volume. But Eben Bayer is thinking about it...